H.S. junior-year English was chock full of insufferable British lit. The only novel I managed to complete was “Watership Down.” I had to rely on Cliff Notes for “Jane Eyre,” “Great Expectations,” and other unmemorable “classics” of the English language.
For my personal reading, I was in my sci-fi phase: Asimov and Clarke.
In my freshman year, we started with Homer and went on to Shakespeare. My sophomore class, at a different school, focused on world literature--more Shakespeare, Dostoevskii, Orwell, Dickens, Karel Čapek, etc.
As a junior, we focused more on American literature, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (Boston: Ticknor, 1850), Herman Melville's Moby Dick (New York: Harper, 1851), and The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (New York: Appleton, 1895). The class also covered poetry by Walt Whitman, Dorothy Parker, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, etc.
To fulfill assignments, I read on my own books by George Stewart, a professor at UC Berkeley whose mid-twentieth century bestsellers are today largely forgotten, and Hector C.Bywater's The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (London: Constable, 1925).
I graduated just in time. Not long afterwards, this curriculum began to be dumbed down and made politically correct.